Only Geniuses Can Solve This Riddle

Can you solve this riddle?

There are so many ways to exercise your brain and boost its power. It’s a shame more people don’t work out their mind as much as they do their abs or legs. Science has shown that activities like playing musical instruments, learning new languages, meditation, and doing things to increase your short-term memory increases your brain’s power and keep it working properly. Solving puzzles and riddles regularly can increase your brain’s neuroplasticity — the change in neural pathways that helps regions of the brain communicate with other regions. More neuroplasticity means your brain is working better!

Entire businesses like Lumosity and Happify are built around the idea that regular working of your problem solving skills can keep you sharp as a tack! We may not be one of those type services, but we do appreciate a good riddle now and then — and we want to share this one with you! It’s a real headscratcher and it definitely made our brains light up with activity.

See if you can solve this brain buster for yourself!

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Head Scratcher

Credit: Gayvoronskaya_Yana/Shutterstock

A waiter walks up to a customer and asks if he’d like to order. The man only asks for a glass of water, a lemon wedge, and a match.

When the waiter returns with these items, the customer begins a series of actions that lead to a head-scratching riddle only the most ingenious of waiters could solve.

Whether by dumb luck or if you paid great attention in high school science classes, this is one riddle you’ll have to try for yourself after solving (or giving up)!

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The Riddle

Credit: Alexey_Erofejchev/Shutterstock

A customer at a restaurant orders a glass of water, a lemon wedge, and a match. When the waiter brings him the items, he pours the water onto his plate and says to the waiter, “If you can get this water back into the glass without touching or moving the plate, I’ll give you $100.”

Would you be able to solve the riddle and win the money?

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The Video

Did you solve it yet? Press play and spoil it, or keep thinking. Either way, we’re obviously going to explain it all for you below — just not yet.

Okay! If you still haven’t gotten it, watched it, and are still wondering — here is how it works!

The key to solving the riddle and getting the water back into the glass is by creating a vacuum.

First, the lemon is a misdirect — it could be anything that would hold the match! Place the lemon wedge in the middle of the plate. Then light the match and stick it into the lemon wedge with the flame burning at the top.

Finally, place the glass over the lemon and match, and voilà!

The riddle is solved.

As the match burns and uses up all the oxygen in the glass, it will create a vacuum, which will then suck in all the water around the rim of the glass. Science is wild, y’all.

Were we able to stump you with these highly sophisticated, brain-teasing riddles? Let us know your best riddle in the comments. Don’t forget to SHARE this article with your nerdy and non-nerdy friends, check out Buzzfeed‘s original post, then try out this science experiment for yourself!

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